Building a tool that tries (and probably fails) to remove the watermark (due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win) is tacitly accepting the barcode. The hacker ethos should be, first and foremost, to run open source models locally without relying on a corporation.
>due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win
Much like how the entirety of Hollywood, book publishers, academic publishers, and game developers have won against piracy despite being some of the largest corps on earth and dedicating untold billions to the issue over the past 30 years?
They won the long game. Everything is rented and DRM now. Very little of what most people buy digitally is truly owned.
They didn’t win because of DRM. They won because of the regulations that grant a monopoly for a specific term in the form of a copyright. Society has recognized that incentivizing creative acts requires a temporary grant of monopoly to ensure the necessary scarcity to make money and recover the costs of creation. The real problem is Disney keeps expanding that time period so things never enter the public domain
they didn't win by attacking piracy head-on though, they made capitulation easy & nice enough for us to happily go along.
They have a finite # of employees, a finite budget, and a finite amount of time.
Hobbyists do not. ROI is not a factor.
As yes, the hobbyist built nuclear weapons program.....
Legalize recreational plutonium.
To be fair the state works pretty hard to crush "hobbyist" nuclear weapons programs so you don't really know how far it could get.
By the time you're building (or buying) the necessary highly esoteric and expensive ultracentrifuge setup I think you would be well outside the realm of "hobbyist" unless someone insists on the most unreasonably pedantic definition for the term.
Unless we're only considering final assembly. Just gotta get that weapons grade fissile material supplier lined up. That might or might not qualify as rich hobbyist territory depending on how high a price tag is permissible.
You don't have to use the ultracentrifuge, though I don't suppose the power plant you would need for a diffusion plant would be much more attainable.
so which one is it here?
This subthread starts off with the argument that the big corps will never beat the little determined hackers, one of the founding myths of the early internet. And then every now and then a strong little branch of the argument runs up against an example and it becomes well sure, the little hobbyist hackers don't have anything there but that is because the big corps/gov/billionaires/whatever put so much into beating them.
I mean reading it all certainly sounds like the people on the little guy's side are overestimating the value of pluck, an observation Hollywood generally makes just before the heroes with pluck win for ever!
You don’t happen to know a certain Doc Brown?
What? Some nerds on private trackers and kids on 123movies or whatever is not piracy winning by any material stretch.
Yes. Winning against piracy doesn't mean you completely eliminate piracy. It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others.
Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.
> It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others.
By which definition they utterly failed.
> Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.
Not at all. Netflix and Spotify do well because they are a good value proposition for the average customer. Piracy is free at point of "purchase" but is (and always has been) expensive in terms of various sorts of overhead.
> [fighting against the system] is tacitly accepting the barcode.
I don't really see it. I think it's important to win on both fronts.
Especially as the open weight models are really generated by corporates, and they could stop releasing them at any time.
But we'd still have them. It's not like we're gaining much with new training anymore anyway
I appreciate my coding agent being increasingly aware of the walrus operator :)
They also have built in dystopian government authority enforcement in them unless you go to pains to sever those neurons.
Fighting within the system is accepting the system.
> No use messing with Google's watermark, fellas. Go do something else that's 100x harder instead.
> works for Google
Gee, I wonder why...
This is the “instead of using seatbelts, we should invest in trains” argument.
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